Eight years ago, Jennifer Searl used a handicapped permit to get around campus at the University of New Hampshire. Last October, Searl, 26, ran a half-marathon and felt so good afterward she immediately signed up for another. In between these two extremes lies not only a journey of a thousand steps, but one taken along a path Searl herself blazed - with help from the Massachusetts General Hospital Transplant Center.

On July 17, the MGH celebrated the establishment of the MGH Endowed Chair in Renal Transplantation and its first incumbent Nina Tolkoff-Rubin, MD, medical director of the MGH Renal Transplantation Program.